Intel Pin Tool; Setting up in 5 easy steps

This is the beginning of the Intel Pin Tool Series. Having read this post, you will be able to set up Intel pin tool and run a basic example to count the number of instructions in your program.

Step 1

Download the pin tool from Intel (https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/pin-a-binary-instrumentation-tool-downloads). Select the appropriate operating system and copy the download link. For example,

wget https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/pintool/downloads/pin-3.7-97619-g0d0c92f4f-gcc-linux.tar.gz -P /tmp/

Step 2

Extract the file that you have downloaded.

tar -zxvf pin-3.7-97619-g0d0c92f4f-gcc-linux.tar.gz

This section is optional. But if you are intending to use the tool on a regular basis, I would strongly suggest that you extract it into /opt directory and that you create a symbolic link so that you could manage versions in the future easily.

sudo cp /tmp/pin-3.7-97619-g0d0c92f4f-gcc-linux.tar.gz /opt/
cd /opt
tar -zxvf pin-3.7-97619-g0d0c92f4f-gcc-linux.tar.gz
ln -s /opt/pin-3.7-97619-g0d0c92f4f-gcc-linux /opt/pin-dir

Step 3

Navigate in to pin-dir and test by running a given example.

cd /opt/pin-dir/source/tools

Check whether you have a 32 bit architecture or a 64 bit architecture using lscpu command. Depending on this your compiler arguments will have to be modified. If the architecture is x86_64,

make all

If the architecture is 32 bit,

make all TARGET=ia32

Step 4

Run the instruction count example,  by navigating in to the folder obj-intel64. To test the tool, you will need a gcc compiled object file. For now assume that the object binary is prog.

cd ManualExamples/obj-intel64
./pin -t /opt/pin-dir/source/tools/ManualExamples/obj-intel64/inscount0.so -- ~/prog

Pro tip! – Do not forget the -- in between the above command. This is specified in the pin tool as follows. ./pin -t [full path to tool] – [full path to app]

Step 5

View the results. The instruction count in your program would be stored in inscount0.out which will be residing in the /opt/pin-dir directory.

cat /opt/pin-dir/inscount0.out

In the next blog post in the intel pin series, learn how you could create your own tool to count the number of branches.